Ah, sweet, sweet “idealism”

Post navigation

Grab a particularly painful, obtuse quote, and then dump all over it – that’s the nihilism that only this site can provided, straight, unfiltered, and free of charge. WordPress servers are run on marshmallow juice, anyway, and there is no time to waste.

In the NGO non-profit sector, there is a way to live, prosper, and expound without seeming to have to make any money at all. Gabriel Metcalfe, the “CEO”of Spur.org, a “non” profit doing who knows what to keep its sorry ass from drowning, has written a book on “Democratic Change” or somesuch, and here’s the grand chorus:

What I really hope is that this book will be useful to another generation of activists, who will be able to take things much farther than we did. Both in the theory and understanding of how change happens, but also in the movement building and institution building. There’s an unbroken chain going far back in time of people who have worked to solve the problems they saw around them, to leave the world a better place for the ones who would come after them. I see so much idealism in the new generation, and that includes my kids, and really my biggest hope is that some of them get some ideas of things to try from reading this book.

Did you say you had kids, there, Gabe? Well then, feel free to paint sugary sweet beatific goodness all around the known and ill-trusted world, because, well, if you have kids, you want good things for them, and you can’t a little thing like rampaging income inequality, or ineluctable climate change, or criminal hedge funders living higher off the hog than ever, or just about any institutional power operation taking place outside your door, from stopping little Junior You or You-ess from having a happy, beautiful future.

“idealism” must ahve been pure, sweet innocent gold back in the storied, halycyon 60s, but time and truth have traduced that naive faith in better-worldism. Idealism is the refuge of well-paid, hyper-privileged mommy-daddy fudgeniks. Your kid is not guaranteed a happy big world, so tell your little ones your sparkle-table encomia to get them to sleep well, but save the reality for the adult world.